[wtp-incubator-dev] Re: Eclipse XSL Tools

[Doug Satchwell <doug.satchwell@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Stuart - its good to see people like yourself using XSL Tools and coming up with ways to improve it! I have (and I'm sure David has) contemplated some of these things before, but have never found the time to progress them. Anything you can do to help in the way of code contributions would be much appreciated.

The points you raise all seem reasonable and achievable, though some are certainly more difficult than others! I've got some comments to add, but what I'd suggest is that you raise each of these points as enhancements in bugzilla https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/
You just need to sign up, then create the bugs (of type enhancement) under WebTools / WTP Incubator / wtp.inc.xsl .

When thats done, we can take a look and add our comments on how best to approach the problems. In the meantime, you should continue down the path of writing some code to achieve your aims (you did the right thing by checking out the code from CVS). When you feel that you have something substantial, you can make a patch and attach your new code to the bugs so that we can take a look and potentially accept it as a contribution. Any siginicant code contributions that are accepted would probably also need some JUnit tests to go with it, and of course any code you write must be licensed as EPL, so if you're OK with that then all should be fine.

I've cc'd the WTP incubator dev list so everyone has visibility.

Cheers,

Doug

________________________________
From: Stuart Harper <stuartharper@xxxxxxxxx>
To: doug.satchwell@xxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, 8 December, 2008 23:27:43
Subject: Eclipse XSL Tools

Hi Doug,

Apologies for mailing you directly - I spent a good long while searching around the Eclipse XSL tools website/wiki but I couldn't find any sort of mailing list or forum to direct queries to.

I'm interested in doing some work with XSL tool project in order to adapt it to the needs of the company I work for. We use XSLT extensively in our middleware platform for the travel industry. I've installed the latest milestone build and reviewed the release plan and open bugs, I'm particularly interested in the following;

-Having the ability to redefine import locations on a per file and per folder basis. Our development and deployment layouts can be quite different and our imports are generally absolute against a base folder rather than relative (so file a.xsl and b.xsl are both in a folder called common a would have an import with the reference "/common/b.xsl" rather than "b.xsl"). This has always been problematic for XSL tools and I'm keen to fix it. I noticed some mention of having build configurations in one of the bugs but I think what I need would be a little more advanced.

-Full XSL variable resolution so if you type <xsl:value-of select="//node1//" /> you get a drop down list of the known children of node1 based on an input xml and/or schema. There is a bug in there for XQUERY navigation which I think might be similar to what I want.

-Helper resolution/popup support.. We have a Java framework we access via xsl helpers so we'd like to be able to see which methods are available when we access them and get errors if we make obvious mistakes like calling methods which don't exist (I think type checking might be a lot trickier).

-Somewhat aspirational but I'd really like decent round-trip support. We do a lot of dynamic web development in XSL so it would be nice to view the HTML output of a template call, make a change to the XSL and see the change instantly reflected.

I could just grab the source code and build our own internal tool (and remerge on every release to maintain compatibility with Eclipse/get new features) but assuming the things I plan to do are sensible and of use to the actual Eclipse project I'd much rather contribute directly starting with my first point above (since it's been a long standing issue for us).

Do you have any thoughts on the best way to proceed? I've used the teamset to checkout the project and I'm going through the available documentation to setup a development environment. I'd like to make sure any changes I make will be broadly compatible with the future direction of the project.